I've used Timely now for a week and it's been very interesting. I seem to be able to plan only about half of the the time that I should have available.

I've used Timely to plan my workdays this week. I'm at the office about 8 hours a day, so on Monday I naturally open Timely and slapped what I estimated to be about 8 hours of work on it. After a while I realized that this wasn't going to happen. I hadn't managed to even start the first item on the list and it was already 10:00.

Random emails, random calls and questions and all the stuff that happens, happened. All the little things, that you have to sort out, but never enter the official agenda of the day. This was pretty illuminating, if not really surprising, if you think about it logically.

After about a week of planning stuff into Timely, it seems that I can track about four hours of creative work into an eight hour workday. This doesn't include meetings and other pre-determined blocks of time, which basically just shorten the amount of time that a workday has for creative work. Still, the ratio stays about the same. One hour of planned work needs about two hours of clock time.

I'm not certain if this is something that actually means anything. In a perfect world I'd accurately estimate "random stuff" into the day and could then realistically plan what to do with the rest of the time. In an even more perfect world I wouldn't have any random stuff to track and would just work in a continuous flow state for eight hours without any disturbances at all.

It's interesting, but I'm not sure what to feel about it yet. Using Timely and planning for stuff seems obviously useful, but also sort of stressing. Maybe in a good way though. Not sure, I'll make another report after another week!